The last 15 years have seen a bumper crop of collected
poems by some of our senior or deceased innovative poets, but this book takes
that further by offering a Reader. So
we get the poems, of course, but we also get some critical prose, and -
interleaved between both - we get commentary from the editor, Ian Brinton, as
well as commentary by others as background. These intrusions sometimes don't
leave Andrew Crozier's poems room to breathe on their own. Letters from
fellow poets inevitably praise, and snippets from interviews or reproductions
of postcards used in the making of poems, move imperceptibly from poetics to
interpretation. I offer this as a warning to prospective readers (of which I
hope there will be many) in their navigation of this essential and
well-edited volume, because this material is important in illuminating the
poems and in presenting the many contexts in which Crozier's work appears,
but some might want to avoid it on first reading.

Thus we have a historicised Crozier. We read the early faultless exercises in
American projectivism (both before and after he studied with Charles Olson at
Buffalo). We read of his famous re-discovery of Carl Rakosi via some late
introductions to the work and writings on Objectivism generally (including
one of the best assessments of George Oppen's early work). We see him moving
closer to other members of the so-called Cambridge School (J.H. Prynne and
Douglas Oliver, for example), and we witness a strange and unexplained
petering out of the creative work after the 1990s (though there are robust
critical writings from this century).

I am still drawn to the excellent sequences of the 1970s as primary evidence
of his importance (though I pass over Printed Circuit which Veronica Forrest-Thomson lambasted in Poetic
Artifice. Never attempt to copy Prynne.) The
Veil Poem of 1971-2 we are told, via the
commentaries, amount to 10 responses to 10 postcards of Islamic architecture.
I've previously read the sequence as a kind of domestic meditation in
post-Olsonian process, via English Romanticism, and I still read it that way,
despite the recognisable presence of 'arches' and 'carpets' from the images.
The lines 'How can I know anything so grand/ but from a postcard' read less
ironically, but they proclaim a perceptive balance. The images are 'banal
and/ awful as any literal image'. After all, the 10 poems sign off with a
cosmic sweep that can be read as a local corrective to the global pretensions
of the poems' donnˇes:

The dust beneath myfingernails
is all the wisdom I haveto take with
me upstairs to my wife.

This still reads like Coleridge of 'Frost at Midnight' filtered through A.N. Whitehead,
shudderingly beautiful.

Pleats, which was written in
1974, takes this materialist mysticism further, as Douglas Oliver noted in a
letter of the time, calling it a 'quasi-day-to-day history'; its 'insights ...
spread out into a wider dimension', including the domestic as notional and
notational experience: 'Good morning 7 a.m.../Lewes 3858'. (It seems odd that
in the commentary, which is so precise about geographical location in
Crozier's earlier life, we are never told he moved to Lewes to work for many
years at the nearby Sussex University.) Indeed, much of this notebook-like
sequence seems to be 'about' moving house, 'Closing the attic door on
memory'. But amid the quotidian there is a growing sense of the role of
language in constructing reality. One prose passage offers a meta-discourse
on this improvisational 'dummy book without language': 'Every day
possibilities suggest themselves and I neglect some or omit to enter them so
the book lacks one kind of fullness that I restore as I go along' by adding
passages from elsewhere (I assume). 'There is no palimpsest writing in the
end.'
For a writer aware of procedure almost on an Oulipo level (and in one of the
interview excerpts here he does use the Oulipean word 'constraint') it is no
surprise that High Zero, a
group of 24 poems of 24 lines each, topped and tailed with parodies of Prynne
and John James, was written by an unusual procedure. Like a painter (I
suppose) working on numerous canvases at once, he wrote all the lines 1, then
2, then 3, etc... until the poems were complete. Whether it needed the chummy
in-crowd nodding of the framing poems (the title is a combination of titles
by Prynne and James), or indeed needed the painterly technique (or, more
precisely, whether a reader needs to know any of this), this sequence is a
richly metaphorical examination of the perceptual and imaginational
components of the day to day:

Rain drips in
the casement of an outdoor lifefrom day to day bonheurwhere condensation
clings as though breathwould fly
through the windowstill moving slowlyin a
gathering wave at the meniscusready to launch itselfin immaculate
newness.

Of course, given the method, the poem was itself written day to day,
serially. Between each enjambment (and in one of the interviews Crozier is
insistent upon the metrical integrity of individual lines) lies the writing
of 23 other lines from 23 other unfinished poems. It is quite remarkable in
its 'immaculate newness'.

There are both excellent and less-achieved isolated poems throughout this
book but Crozier thought the crowning glory of his poetry was his sequence
from the 1990s, 'Free Running Bitch' which coalesces many thematic strands, while
(as far as I can see) eschewing the techniques of earlier pieces. From his
early encounter with American poetry he inherited an insistence upon the spoken
voice (he is sceptical in interview about
claims for the musicality of
language) which he settles into a mode that is capable of calm and emphasis,
wonder and despair. House moving has been superseded by house clearance, it
seems. He refuses to read (his mother's?) school

The prohibitions on the back cover of the exercise book ('warnings on traffic
... Don't run') metamorphose into the narrator's own finely-balanced decision
to relinquish the pull of the past whilst refusing to forget it: 'don't hang
on, don't forget'. 'Blank/ history' and 'illegible map' suggest the fragility
involved.

Among the critical prose there are a number of pieces on British poetry.
Although Crozier's much-quoted (by me anyway!) 'Thrills and Frills' attack
upon what I call the Movement Orthodoxy is not included here, there is a
welcome and summarising update, 'Resting on Laurels', which traces the
adventure of canonical poetry in Britain through to the millennium, taking
Raine and Armitage as representative figures (we can only have one such
figure per decade, he comments). Of the 'New Poetry' of the 1990s he snarls,
'Such poetry was only new in the sense that it was waiting to be recuperated
by the canon, prime cuts resting on Movement laurels.' Pitch against this
self-regulating mechanism his rediscovery and re-animation of the isolated
Rakosi and you can see why he would feel like this. He writes with feeling of
Rakosi (and perhaps of himself), 'A writing block or inhibition' -
particularly professional work getting in the way of writing - 'is part of
the phenomenology of writing.' Like a number of writers (I'm thinking of
Peter Riley with Nicholas Moore) he has re-examined the reviled 1940s to find
a significant writer who was eclipsed by the Movement Orthodoxy: in Crozier's
case, J.F. Hendry, whom he praises for negotiating politics at the level of
experience, 'the work of a complex, absorptive mind'. But his piece on Roy
Fisher's A Furnace negotiates
the readings of Donald Davie on Fisher's early work and sees a materialist
mysticism in Fisher's 'making of identities through the action of signs when
not subjected to authority, the authority above all of time.' It might be a
little too easy to say that this describes Crozier's work too, but there is
clearly a relationship between Fisher's domestic phenomenological
defamiliarisations and Crozier's 'day to day bonheur' that evades (or
ignores) the canon.